LOL!
Budgetary bills must START, in the House. They don't have to end
there, Mr Reid.
On Apr 7, 7:41 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> "Now the Republicans command the House of Representatives. So what does this mean? The House controls the purse strings. No official appropriation can pass without House approval. This means that any deficit spending, any unconstitutional spending, any irresponsible spending, any spending on anything that violates liberty or undermines the economy can be blamed fully on the Republicans."Blame the RepublicansPosted by Anthony Gregory on April 7, 2011
> Of course, the Democrats are spendthrifts at their core. They have a seemingly invincible faith in government spending, and to say they are stubborn in their refusal to accept anything approaching a substantial cut would be a gross understatement. But Democrats are known for this quality. They may once in a while pay lip service to going "line by line" and eliminating waste -- as Obama did -- but almost no one believes this. And if anyone actually did believe it when Obama promised it, the whole idea behind this vow was that Obama was different from your average Democrat. Tax-and-spend characterizes both the phenotype and genotype of the Democratic Party.
> Republicans, however, pretend to be different. They've pretended to oppose lavish spending at least since the Great Society. In the following years it has always been a key GOP talking point to oppose "big government" and "wasteful spending." This is what Reagan's revolution was always about. This is what swept Republicans into power over Congress in the wake of the 1994 elections, after forty years of being the minority in the legislature. Promises of lower spending were in the background when George W. Bush won the White House. These promises were absolutely critical in the midterm upset of 2010.
> Now the Republicans command the House of Representatives. So what does this mean? The House controls the purse strings. No official appropriation can pass without House approval. This means that any deficit spending, any unconstitutional spending, any irresponsible spending, any spending on anything that violates liberty or undermines the economy can be blamed fully on the Republicans.
> To say this is not to indemnify the Democrats. It is possible for both parties to be completely blameworthy. If five gunmen all serve on a firing squad to execute a man they know to be innocent, and they all pull the trigger, they are all 100% guilty. Blame does not work the way credit does. We share credit. But with blame, there is often more than 100% to go around.
> And the Republicans deserve 100% blame for what the federal government does from here on forward. Even Obama's presidential decrees can usually be reined in by sufficient Congressional determination. But let's put that aside and just focus on the out of control spending. It's all the Republicans' fault. Never forget it.
> Now, some will protest. They will point out that all it takes is a handful of Republicans and the Democrats can pass irresponsible budgets. This complaint ignores three important points.
> One, if this is the Republicans' excuse for failing to restrain government growth, much less reverse it and reduce the size of government, then we are pretty much doomed. Why's that? The Republicans always say, "Just give us Congress, and we'll prove that we're for limited government." They did that last election cycle. Even when they have all of Congress, they say, "Just give us the presidency, and then we'll cut government." That's what they did in 2000. But when they run the presidency and Congress, they are shameless big spenders. To suggest they throw away money like drunken sailors is an insult to sailors as well as an exaggeration of the effects of alcohol on one's financial judgment. Give me a drunken sailor any day, compared to the trillion dollar bonanzas -- Iraq and Medicare D among them -- the Republicans deliver when they're unchecked. On the other hand, those of us who assume gridlock is better than single-party rule are invariably treated to the spectacle of seeing the Republicans complain that without a greater control over the federal government, they are helpless to cut back government.
> Two, the Republicans, like the Democrats, are politicians, and when a few of them vote with the other side, don't automatically assume that it is in betrayal of the party's true agenda. The leadership of both parties is dedicated to government growth across the board. But they do have to play politics and please their constituencies. There is an unspoken game these crooks play, whereby they all knowingly let many bills pass with just barely the necessary margin for victory. Meanwhile, the rest of the "opposition" party pretends it's disappointed in its rogue members. The Republicans whose constituents would be most dissatisfied with a Republican compromise with Democrats will hold their ground, knowing that other Republicans can afford to vote with the Democrats and advance the interest that unites virtually all of themthe interest of expanding government power in practically all directions.
> Three, the Republicans are not proposing anything better than the Democrats anyway. Sure, they want to pass budgets that are a few tens of billions less than what the Democrats are pushing, but that hardly amounts to rounding error. It is all theater. If the Republicans actually proposed to cut a trillion dollars from the budget this year, only to see a few of them cave and vote with the Democrats, maybe we could refrain from blaming the whole bunch. But that's never what happens. They propose measly, tiny cuts to pretend they are principled -- or slightly larger cuts they know won't pass even within their party, cuts that sound like a mark of revolutionary thinking until you realize they amount to less than half the deficit -- and expect us to cheer for them for standing up to those "big-government" Democrats.
> Whatever happens -- government shutdown or no shutdown -- the United States will soon enough overcome this "problem" of not having a budget and the devalued money will continue to flow out of Washington, as it is doing now, but with the explicit endorsement of the president and both houses of Congress. When that happens, there will be plenty of blame to go around. But the Republicans as much as anyone will deserve all of it.http://johndennisreport.com/uncategorized/blame-the-republicans
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